THE FEMINIST SCHOLAR
By Jo Freeman

This article was published in QUEST: a feminist quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 1, Summer 1979, pp. 26-36, and later translated into German. An earlier version was given as the keynote address at the Feminist Scholar conference at Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, NJ, May 16, 1974.

At first glance, there appears to be an inherent contradiction in the term "feminist scholar." The idea of the scholar implies one who sits back and dispassionately studies a topic; who seeks and objectively weighs all evidence, forming an opinion only after the data are in. Yet as a feminist, when I am dealing with questions concerning women, I don feel in the least dispassionate; the "truth" is largely predetermined by the feminist values that I hold; and while I'm willing to look at all evidence, I reserve the right to interpret it in a way that will support my position. To be a feminist, in effect, is to advocate a particular point of view. Starting from the premise that women and men have the same potential for individual development, this view examines the way in which social institutions create differences; it rejects the idea that there is any meaningful choice for members of either sex as long as there are socially prescribed sex roles and social penalties for those who deviate from them. This is the description of a decisively political position -- which I use my academic. training to support.
Such an alliance of scholarship and advocacy would have been thought an unholy one fifteen or so years ago. Those were the days when the myth of value-free social science predominated. People really believed -- or at least said they did -- that they could approach a fresh research problem uncontaminated by their past experiences and present circumstances. Since then, however, the radical critique of social science has made us aware that all knowledge reflects a bias. People's background and position in the social structure not only determine their interpretation, but filter out what they think they see. In the words of one anonymous pundit, "How you stand depends on where you sit."
Fortunately, this critique preceded the women's liberation movement. It therefore made it easier to be both advocate and scholar. Most academicians are now sensitive to the fact that we all have values which lead us to particular research projects, which define our methods, our conclusions. Points of view not only exist within disciplines but can be brought to disciplines. Sociology has even been described as the attempt to draw a mathematically precise line between unwarranted assumptions and foregone conclusions. Thus, the fact that my scholarship is guided by a feminist perspective does not make it qualitatively different than that of others.
Nonetheless the awareness of ubiquitous bias does impose upon one some responsibilities which those who thought they were value-free could blissfully ignore. The primary responsibility is to not be blinded by one's own politics. There is a time for pure advocacy and a time for critical reflection. Just as the awareness of the inevitable bias of any scholarship makes it easier to apply one's own, so must that awareness make one constantly reexamine one's perceptions. This responsibility grows greater as the acceptability and influence of one's perspective -- feminist or non-feminist --increases. When one is an outsider, criticizing the established view, one can legitimately muster all one's forces for the assault without tolerance for differing points of view. But singlemindedness is a privilege permissible only to those out of power. The more established one becomes, the less one can afford it. To fail to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with power, is to undermine the right to hold it.
Feminists are a long way from gaining much institutional power, so in many ways this responsibility is still a theoretical one. Nonetheless, the need for it can be seen in those few situations where we do exercise significant influence. The best example is the classroom. You may personally like, associate with or support someone on the basis of whether or not they agree with you. But you cannot morally grade them on that basis. Good teaching does not permit pushing a line. power must always be used with discretion.
Provided this discretion is used, feminist advocacy is as compatible with being a scholar as are the many other political views scholars hold. But if feminism is compatible with scholarship, is it necessarily compatible with academia? Frankly, I think it is not. Not only is there an inherent contradiction between the values of the academic world and those of feminism, but that world does not look favorably upon serious dissidents from the status quo -- especially if such dissidents are brash enough to live their beliefs (as feminism requires). Cooley pointed out almost 50 years ago that:
It is strange that we have so few men of genius on our faculties: we are always trying to get them. Of course, they must have undergone the regular academic training (say ten years in graduate study and subordinate positions) and be gentlemanly, dependable, pleasant to live with, and not apt to make trouble by urging eccentric ideas.¹

To explain the above conclusions, I must digress from the subject of feminist scholarship to examine the structure and values of the academic profession. Contrary to popular belief, the academic establishment is not in business to pursue truth, promulgate knowledge, or even to package people. Its purpose is the production of prestige.²

The Prestige System

Once one accepts the prevalence of the prestige-motive, most of the otherwise strange actions of academics become quite clear. After all, why do intelligent people spend five to ten years of their lives, paying their own way, to earn the Ph.D union card necessary for a possible job whose starting salary is less than that of a New York sanitation worker? Why is a school's value judged more by the number of Nobel Prize winners it can list in its catalog than by the number or success of its students? Why is the American Council on Education's regular rating of graduate schools based on faculty peer group estimation rather than by the kinds of courses offered? Why is it that we all categorize universities according to their prestige ranking without wondering if there is any substantive basis for this ranking? Why do academics prefer to publish in low circulation journals, and literally thumb their noses at anyone who seeks a wider audience through the popular press? Why are academicians' status determined not by the courses they teach but where they teach them?
Just as the "profit-motive" has informed the analysis of our economic system, so the "prestige-motive" underlies our academic system.
Not all institutions of higher education pursue prestige down the same paths. But academia is a hierarchy and at the top the thirty or forty "major universities" set the ethos for the academic world at large. They do this through their hegemony over public attention, their connections with the private and public elites, their role as gatekeepers to the professional journals and most of all through their Ph.D.'s, who staff a preponderance of all four-year institutions. Even when these graduates commit themselves to institutions with a different purpose than those in which they were trained, they still carry with them the values of their home institutions -- institutions who measure "productivity" by publication.³
Despite myths about merit, in the prestige system "productivity" is determined not by any objective rating, but by the subjective feelings of one's disciplinary peers. What counts is not what you do but what other people think of what you do.⁴ In order for others to judge what you do, they must see it. They don't see teaching. How many faculty members ever visit the classroom of another. or inquire of their students as to their colleagues' pedagogical effectiveness? One must publish because that is the only way to be seen -- and hence the only way to count.
However, one's colleagues rarely see publications in journals out side their own discipline, or even their own specialty. After all, no one has time to read everything. They do see publication in those journals they read, and/or on the topics they do their own research on. Thus, where you publish and what you publish on is more important than the quality of what you say. Research on women, for example, is rarely read by male colleagues, and is largely considered to be at worse faddish, and at best narrow. Even if one has written twenty papers on extremely diverse aspects of women's existence, it is still considered to be in the same subfield and hardly comparable to five good papers on voting statistics or Melville's novels.

The topic of women aside, most disciplines are subject to their own intellectual and stylistic trends, and if one is not going with the tide, one often can be washed out. Departments quite deliberately hire and fire, in part, on what kind of research they want to support, and many young scholars have seen their careers go down the drain because they didn't fit the right category at the right time.⁵ The moral to this story is that one must not only publish or perish, one may also publish and perish.
One can try to opt out of this game by decisively insisting on doing one's own work regardless of the consequences. The usual results are not conducive to scholarship, feminist or otherwise. One either ends up as a research assistant finding the facts for someone else's theories, an overworked instructor in a "low-prestige" school with a teaching load so heavy one barely has time to do one's lectures let alone one's research . . . or unemployed. The continuing constriction of academic jobs does not make these prospects appear brighter in the future. It is only when faced with one of these prospects that one becomes acutely aware of why the prestige system manages to hold together.
The more prestigious places usually have the resources young scholars desperately need. Laboratories, government grants, research libraries, collegial expertise, small course loads, computers, contacts with foundations, publishers and journals, are just some of the more tangible assets. Universities get these by playing the prestige game and thus do not look favorably upon those
who violate the rules.⁶
It is only when one lacks the institutional supports one needs that one realizes how dependent individual scholars are upon them. The ivory tower thinkers who need only their own books and their own muses are very rare, and usually in the humanities. Because success begets success it is easier to attract even outside support if the scholar is associated with a place that has a tradition of receiving it. After all, the people who give out the grants are part of the same networks as most of those who receive them. They look after their own. Prestige is not a very mobile good, and tends to remain in its place of origin. A new school takes years to acquire a reputation, and a declining university takes years to lose one.

The Double Bind

Let us suppose the scholar is one of those fortunate few who comes equipped with most of her resources and could care less about prestige. What then? As a general rule of thumb, the lower the school on the prestige ladder, the greater the course load. Since there are only so many hours in the day, one is then faced with the onerous choice of either shortchanging one's students or shortchanging one's research. Some energetic souls can manage to do both, but most would collapse in physical exhaustion. If one does manage to work in a place with a small course load it is still difficult to be both a good teacher and a good scholar unless one has tenure.
Education is not the purpose of academia and teaching counts for little in most tenure decisions. A poor teaching reputation will be used against you by your opponents, but a good teaching reputation only makes you a threat. In their struggles to make a name for themselves, most faculty cannot afford time for students. A popular teacher becomes a standard of comparison which they cannot meet. Students begin to question why other faculty aren't as good, while they flock to the popular courses. This has roughly the same effect as the efficient factory worker has on his assembly line-known in union terms as "speed up." One can much more justifiably be satisfied with poor teaching if everyone else in the department does the same.

If one is at a school which looks on teaching favorably, the fear of "speed up" is still prevalent, but it is focused on "excessive" research (generally known as "careerism") rather than popular teaching. In these schools it is simply assumed that if one publishes frequently the time for research must be at the expense of other faculty responsibilities. This excuse is used to rid the department of productive scholars who might raise the standards for tenure.
By now it should be clear how the structure of the academic world makes it difficult to be a productive scholar of any kind outside the major universities. These universities in turn operate as exclusive clubs and by so doing define what is acceptable scholarship. Even if a woman should find herself admitted, temporarily, to some of these clubs, she is still limited in the kind of research she can pursue by the definition of what is acceptable. She must constantly defend the value of what she does to her colleagues, who do not wish to see the prestige of their department "diluted by mediocrity."
Most faculty, especially the un-tenured ones, are constantly on the defensive. Their closest colleagues are in reality their closest rivals. Much more than in graduate school, the faculty peer group is highly competitive, and rarely disposed to mutual assistance. The reason it is so competitive is that there are virtually no collective benefits from academic activities.
Prestige from research and publication accrues to the individual scholar and the department at large, but not to other scholars in the department. Grant money may support students or research assistants, but rarely colleagues. Popularity with students simply makes your colleagues look worse. In contrast, nonprestige-gaining activities, such as involvement in committee work or acceptance of difficult courses or schedules imposes burdens, but gains no credit at tenure time. It does not take too long for new faculty to see that it is not in their self interest to take on additional responsibilities.
Consequently, what faculty compete for is not prestige, which can only be conveyed from the outside, but time -- time off from heavy teaching loads, onerous courses and other departmental responsibilities. It is this time that faculty need to produce the publications that gain prestige. It is to get this time that faculty engage in the internecine warfare for which academia is notorious.
In the competition for time, women are frequently at a disadvantage. First of all, as in any hierarchy, costs and burdens are generally passed on to the lowest level, and this is where women are to be found, if at all. Secondly, because women are usually "deviant" in the faculty environment, it is difficult for them to find other faculty with common backgrounds with whom they can ally. This is somewhat alleviated in those rare departments with more than one woman. Third, and most important, the traditional attitudes and expectations about women remain. Women's scholarly achievements are simply viewed as of lesser importance than those of men; they do not bring prestige.⁷ Concomitantly, woman are expected, much more than men, to render service to the campus community. Doing the departmental housekeeping chores is quite consistent with their traditional role. A woman may even be hired for that purpose and not find out until it is too late.
For these reasons, women faculty tend to receive their strongest and most immediate collegial rewards from committee or student work rather than professional and publishing activity. Yet it is still the traditional double bind: those women who stick to their books and their labs are labelled "incompatible" or "uncooperative" and those who don't are dismissed when tenure time comes for insufficient publications.

The Feminist Impact

The operation of the prestige motive can be easily seen if we examine the kind of impact the women's liberation movement has had on academia. There have been basically three different kinds of demands that the movement has made. The first is for more and better jobs -- affirmative action. The second is for curricular changes -- courses on women, and even degrees for those courses. The third demand has been for a variety of fringe benefits such as gynecological care, women's centers and child care.
Starting from the proposition that an institution gives in first in those areas which either cost the least or it values the least, what has been the success of the movement? The low cost fringe benefits -- such as women's centers and feminist speakers --have often been gained. The expensive ones like child care have not been. Curricular changes have come fairly readily. It is estimated that there are several thousand women's studies courses, at least two dozen majors and eleven graduate programs in women's studies.⁸

The reality of the matter is, that "merit" is only one of the criteria used in selecting colleagues. Having the right qualifications and the right recommendations may get one through the first elimination round to the interview stage, but that's as far as it goes. Beyond that, many purely subjective factors, centering around how well one "fits in" to the department, are primary.¹⁰ The hiring process in academia is quite similar to, and serves the same functions as, sorority "rushing" in college.
However, since under the prestige system "merit" is the only legitimate rationale, the role of the other factors cannot be publicly justified.¹¹ Thus the real threat of affirmative action requirements is that they will force departments to "objectify" their selection procedures or to admit that they are, in fact, not objective. Neither consequence is minor. If procedures are objectified, one of the main supports of the prestige system is lost. The academic community, like similar social structures, has its own economy. This economy is based on an exchange of favors, not money. Jobs, information about openings, publication in anthologies and even in journals, participation on panels, critical reviews, ideas, and other information are among the favors that can be exchanged. Like most primitive economies these exchanges are not quid pro quo, but given or received as needed with the understanding that eventually they will be returned. One could look at the academic community as nothing more than an overlapping series of exchange networks. Needless to say, some faculty are in a position to give more favors than they need to receive. They are compensated by being accorded higher prestige. To a certain extent one shows one's importance by the number of favors one can do. Objectification of selection procedures threatens this exchange economy by removing part of the "currency."
It is therefore unlikely that the academic hiring procedures will ever be basically altered. In industry the government can pressure for affirmative action through manipulation of the "profit-motive" -- by threatening to cost a recalcitrant company money. Higher education does not operate on the profit motive and is not responsive to such threats. Indeed, the prestige motive defies manipulation because to change the hiring process is to undermine the prestige system itself.

Notes